How I Made a Six-Figure Income Working 5-10 Hours a Week

First, let me start off by saying I never talk about money on this blog. Never.

So why now?

Well, I see so many bloggers trying to make all of their income from ads and sponsored posts alone. While that works for many, many people, it’s not the only way to earn a six-figure income. If you have a skill that you can teach, you should STRONGLY consider creating a course or other digital product. Even promoting other peoples’ products by becoming an affiliate is a strong avenue for additional income. With the limited amount of time I spend on my business, there’s no way I could have earned that six figures in a year just from ads and sponsored content.

Second, six figures seem to be the magical threshold people want to reach so it felt like the right time to share. I mean, I can’t lie. I shed tears of joy when I hit $100,000 for last year’s income. I’ve been in blogging world since 2009 so it seemed extra momentous! That being said, remember this is my GROSS income. Oh, I’d love it if I got to take home over 100 grand!

(This post contains a few affiliate links.)

In this post, I want to show you that you CAN earn a sizeable income from your online business, even working as little as 5-10 hours a week. (And many of these tips are for those of you without a digital product too so keep reading.) It’s about working smart and not wasting time on things that don’t matter. My online business is my side hustle (I work 32 hours a week for a major brand). Here are five keys to my success in making a side hustle, six-figure income from my online business last year:

1. I Worked in Sprints for Maximum Productivity.

This tip can work wonders, whether you have a digital product or not!

Sprints are 1-2 week long pushes where you work on a single project. They’re based on the sprints done in agile project management, which really I know nothing about. Haha. But I was introduced to the idea early last year and started mapping out projects I wanted to accomplish. No, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t write blog posts or interact on social media during this time. But the majority of my time I spent on my blog during a sprint was on that single project.

Working in sprints kept me laser focused because I worked towards a deadline. It also kept me from bouncing around from project to project, extending how much time they took to complete. When you only have about 5-10 hours most weeks to work on your side business, you really have to maximize the time you spend. To work around my day job, I often work early morning and after the kids go to bed. Most weekends, I squeeze in some time too, but it’s never consistent.

Tip: List out your meatier projects and rank them in which ones have more money-making potential. Start with those and plan out three months of sprints at a time. I like sprints to be 1-2 weeks at a time. For longer projects, I will break them up into 2-week increments and add short one-week sprints in between to avoid burnout.

2. I Wrote Fewer Blog Posts and Sent More Email.

In the past, I always thought more pageviews = more money. If you’re bringing more people to your site, they’ll learn about your products and you’ll sell more, right?

Perhaps. But again, don’t believe that there’s only one single path to earning more.

As I plan content for this year, I looked back at how many posts I wrote last year. Wanna guess?

Twelve blog posts. T-W-E-L-V-E. I was shocked at how few posts I published, especially because I had wanted to do more and felt like a blogging failure for my lack of new blog content. Despite my frustration with myself, it didn’t hurt my income one single bit.

Instead, I sent emails to my email list on a regular basis. They got free stuff, inspiration, and tips to help them grow their online presence. Providing value to your audience and building a genuine rapport with them builds trust. And when you build trust? They’re more likely to spend money with you. With only 5-10 hours a week for work, I found that it was more profitable to write emails than blog posts.

When I had a course sale or promoted an affiliate offer, I wasn’t afraid to send out multiple emails to remind people of the offer. Thanks to ConvertKit, my email service provider, I could also tag people who clicked a link to the course pages. That way, I wasn’t annoying people who weren’t interested with those “just a few hours left!” type emails.

Tip: Focus on building your email list. Send them tips, inspiration, links to your latest blog post, links to tools or articles you think could benefit them. Be HELPFUL. And when you want to promote your products? Don’t be afraid to send more than one email.

3. I Had a Team of Affiliates Helping Me Sell Courses.

Oh, what would I do without my affiliates? They’re like having a sales team!

Affiliates are people who promote your products to their audience and, in return, get a percentage profit from the sale. While I actually have hundreds of affiliates, only a small fraction of that actually made sales. Last year, I paid out nearly $6,000 to about 40 people. They’re amazing and I credit them with helping spread the positive word about Blog Clarity courses.

Digital selling tools like e-Junkie, SendOwl, Gumroad, and others all offer you the ability to create an affiliate program. If you sell courses (or want to sell products in a course platform), my course platform Thinkific also has a built-in affiliate program. And if sell products via a WordPress site, you can use the powerful Affiliate WP. I used that for years before I moved to Thinkific, who has a built-in affiliate platform (though not as good as Affiliate WP).

Tip: If you’re JUST starting out with digital products, I wouldn’t create an affiliate program just yet. Make sure there’s demand for your product (which hopefully you did that before you even created it). Let your first 25-50 sales happen, then ask them to promote you! If they liked your product, they’ll be happy to tell others about it (especially when they make commission off of it).

4. I Ran Special Promos and a 5-Day Challenge (but not Webinars!).

Some of the most profitable times of the year came from special offers.

I ran a few sales throughout the year and encouraged my affiliates to share as well. I know a lot of bigger course instructors don’t offer sales, but I don’t see why you shouldn’t! As long as you don’t run them so often you become like Kohl’s (never buy anything regular price there).

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was the 5-day challenge we did for Pinterest. Last July Anna and I (she’s the co-instructor for the course) ran a Pinterest Summer Challenge to get people ahead of the curve for Pinterest during the holidays. We created a highly-valuable FREE challenge for bloggers that included a workbook, emails, and Facebook Lives.

I’ve always felt like I wasn’t ready for webinars. Too many technical challenges, too much prepwork, too many emails to send out afterwards, etc. So I went with the challenge instead. It probably ended up being about as much work as a webinar would have been, more in fact since we did FIVE days of video instead of one. FB Lives just felt more casual to me.

Without any paid advertising (and an email list of about 5,500 at the time), about 715 people signed up! And how much did we earn from sales? $20,000! That was all within a week of the challenge.

Tip: Plan out periodic sales or an event where you can provide LOTS of value for free, then pitch your product. Even if you don’t have a product, you could use an event to promote an affiliate. For example, everyone loves the InstantPot. Maybe do a cooking demo, then share your affiliate link. Pitching doesn’t mean turning into a slimy salesperson. It DOES mean showing participants how much deeper they can learn or go with the paid offering.

5. I Hired Help.

But you don’t need to HIRE OUT ALL THE THINGS! You can take it in baby steps. A few years ago, I started using Upwork for here-and-there help on my business. It’s a great way to get some things done without committing to someone you have to pay monthly.

Then, I outsourced the most painful part of my business: bookkeeping. Looking at Quickbooks Online about makes me cross-eyed, so I hired that out to someone local. When you spend hours doing something that someone else (who knows what they’re doing) could do for way faster, do everything you can to hire it out.

Finally, the last six months of the year I finally took the biggest leap of all and hired a VA. It’s only 8 hours a month, but that’s 8 more hours I can work on other projects.

Tip: Hire a VA or contractor to help with some tasks that you don’t want to do. Make a list of things you do every week for your business. Then, circle the things you hate doing or that you don’t feel comfortable doing. Those are the things you should hire out.

If you can’t afford to hire help right now, try day batching.

Day Batching refers to setting aside blocks of time each day to work on a single task or project. Some things you can batch: writing blog posts, creating Instagram images, editing photographs, pitching brands, scheduling pins, etc. You can also batch time to work on bigger projects that might change from week to week.

Research has shown that although you might waste only 1/10th of a second switching back and forth on multiple tasks, doing this many times a day can add up to a loss of 40% of your productivity. FORTY PERCENT!

Grab the free day batching sheet below to fill in your tasks for each day of the week. Keep it handy to help you stay on track and crush your productivity.

Get Productive with Day Batching!

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Reader Interactions

Comments

This is such an inspirational post! Thank you for your transparency. I especially liked that you made a point to say it was gross income. Too many people post income without acknowledging that just because you’re a six figure earner doesn’t mean you actually brought home six figures. I just love this post so much, and hope to be posting a similar one at the end of 2018. And p.s. I totally hope to be able to work 5-10 hours a week on my own blog this year. Will definitely be checking out your day batching files!!! 😀

Really appreciate your transparency, Melissa, and awesome job with your blogging business! I love seeing and hearing reports from those who make money outside the typical hosting company. Now I just have to figure out how to scale down my hours so I work less and make more. 🙂

These are some amazing tips! Thank you! I did your 5 day challenge and loved it so much that I bought the course 🙂 I hadn’t thought of how I could do a challenge for my audience – for my product or even an affiliate product. LOVE that you used FB Live instead of a Webinar. Hosting a webinar sounds too tricky, but I could handle a FB Live challenge. I need to work on providing better content for my email subscribers too.

Melissa Culbertsonsays

January 10, 2018

Sounds like you’ve got some great ideas! Yes, webinars seem to always go wrong and I love the go-with-the-flow nature of FB Lives. So much less pressure!

These are such great tips. Life, kids and FT work takes up so much time that at the end of the day you end scrambling for some time any time. I agree planning and keeps you focused on one task at a time and more productive.

Thanks for sharing Melissa. This is the push I need to finish that ebook I’ve been thinking of completing. I’d also love to know what you outsource to Upwork. I’ve used Fiverr for things like having plans drawn up for furniture build projects, but I haven’t used Upwork.

Melissa Culbertsonsays

January 10, 2018

Yes- get that e-book done! I use Upwork for easy design projects mostly. For example, I have someone take my handout templates for my courses and rework them for new courses. Or create title slides for all my course videos. I’ve hired the same person probably 4-5 times for that sort of stuff. I also hired someone to move all my course content over to Thinkific from my old platform. Saved me so much time!

May I ask what things you have your VA doing? That might be a side gig for myself, to help create some extra income!

Melissa Culbertsonsays

January 11, 2018

Yes! She’s replying to some emails, helping with login issues, creating some design work based off of templates, scheduling content, setting up emails in ConvertKit, and sometimes drafting copy for me to then tweak and personalize. It’s been a major help!

Oh thank you so much for your great post.
I am at step 5 right now: Hire help!
Too many tasks, a huge and new market and no experience how to promote our book. So yes, definitely get help will be a thing. I also like the idea of batching. I am the type of person who works on too many things at the same time and I have the very strong feeling that I loose a lot of my productivity there. 40%! Can you imagine?
Thank you for sharing your strategies and being transparent.

Maria

Melissa Culbertsonsays

January 13, 2018

I tend to bounce around when I work too! Batching keeps me in line most of the time. LOL.

Thank you for sharing such a helpful post! I already do a bit of batching and sprinting but now that you’ve made me aware of it, I will really focus on it! Hiring help is also something I need to do. My first big push of 2018 is to move 9 years of mostly evergreen content on my WordPress blog to a new theme (my current theme is being retired and won’t be updated to run on new versions of WordPress). But I’m afraid of hiring the wrong person to do this and losing everything! Do you have any suggestions for how to find someone qualified to do this for a fair price??

Kathysays

January 17, 2018

Hi Melissa, I’ve just started researching blogging. Your site and posts and tone and offerings are sent from HEAVEN! Love the two emails I’ve received so far and saved articles to use as I progress. I’ll be paying attention to YOU, and THANKS for all the lovely free help!!

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Blog Clarity takes the haze out of blogging with can-do tips for any blogger. From blog posts to e-courses, you'll learn to shine your brightest. Without any blogging voodoo magic.